Alumni News 09-10 - Department of Music

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C o l l e g e
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1–3 Events, Celebrations,
Visitors
1, 9, 14–15 Heavy Lifters
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4–5 Faculty Update • Pianos
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6–8, 10 Alumni News
6–7 In Memoriam
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8–9 Fundraising Update,
Music Donors
10–11 Student News
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11 Center for New Music &
Audio Technologies
11 Hargrove Music Library
11–12 Carillon
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11, 14–15 Awards, Prizes,
Honors
15 New Courses
16 Messages
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NOTE FROM THE CHAIR
“Smart people and lots of hair—just what I expected of Berkeley,” was Rufus
Wainwright’s summation at the end of his visit to our department. In town for the San
Francisco Symphony’s performance of his song cycle, Wainwright engaged in a lively
exchange with a cross-section of Music students in the Albert Elkus Room. Wainwright is
just one of the many guests who have contributed to the vibrant intellectual community
of the Department of Music over the past few years. Visiting from Italy, Israel, and
the UK, Pedro Memelsdorf, Edwin Seroussi, and Peter Franklin have taught courses and delivered public
lectures during their semester-long residencies and a series of shorter visits by leading composers from North
America, Europe, and Japan is currently underway. Our students and faculty have many accomplishments
to be proud of—concerts and compositions, papers and publications—as you will see throughout this
newsletter, in which we also mourn the recent loss of several dear members of our community. The
Department of Music has endured the toughest financial crisis in the university’s history undiminished.
Although the end of that crisis is not yet in sight, we continue to strive to improve in our many areas of
activity. Please enjoy this newsletter and turn to our redesigned website, which debuted last fall, for the latest
news of the Department of Music.
—Benjamin Brinner
Heavy Lifters at
the Music Department
Events, Celebrations,
Visitors 2009–2011
By Robert Commanday, January 2010
he fall semester is coming to a close
with splendid concerts by departmental
ensembles, new compositions and
publications by faculty and students, and job
offers for several recent graduates. The University
Symphony’s glorious performance of Mahler’s first
symphony is still ringing in my ears, but alongside
it are the new inventions of our advanced graduate
composers, performed by members of the new Eco
Ensemble, both conducted by David Milnes. Since
the last issue of this newsletter appeared two years
ago we have graduated two classes: ninety music
majors have earned a BA, eleven graduate students
have received their MA, and thirteen have finished
and filed their doctoral dissertations.
Thanks to the dedication of staff, faculty, and
students, as well as the generosity of donors, we have
weathered the university’s financial troubles without
compromising the quality of our programs. The
Stern fund, established in 1930, continues to enable
us to invite distinguished scholars, composers,
and performers to give public presentations,
particularly as visiting Bloch Professors. One of
W
hen asked what inspired your love for
music, drew you into it, most people
would recall a particular teacher and
a one-on-one relationship rather than singular
concert experiences. I believe that that was the case
for many who came to Cal and fell under the spell
of one of the Music Department’s heavy lifters,
Marjorie Gear Petray, Barbara Rahm and Jack
Swackhamer. They were very different individuals
of course, but they shared a capacity for imbuing
students with the discipline of musicianship, the
imperative of developing the skills entailed in
becoming a musician.
12
14
16 A
12–13 Performance Ensembles
o f
Music
C a l i f o r n i a
e
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D e p a r t m e n t
Marjorie Gear Petray
nyone who came through the Department
during Marjorie’s 37 years as a Lecturer, from
1934 to her death in 1971, will have vivid
memories of this brilliant, intense and challenging
woman, and of her piano playing, which was
exceptional. “She was the best teacher I ever had,”
recalls concert pianist Deno Gianopoulos, who
continued on page 9
T
continued on page 2
David Milnes conducts the University Symphony Orchestra
E v e n t s ,
C e l e b r a t i o n s ,
V i s i t o r s
EVENTS, CELEBRATIONS, VISITORS, continued from page 1
Bloch Professor Pedro Memelsdorff
Bloch Professor Peter Franklin
Ben Brinner & Rufus Wainwright
Malcolm Bilson with student pianists
these was Steven Feld, whose lecture series
“Jazz Cosmopolitanism: A View from Accra,
Ghana” was linked to screenings of three films
he had just finished making. In spring 2010,
visiting Bloch Professor Pedro Memelsdorff,
a renowned early music performer, worked
through a detailed study of several medieval
Italian theorist-composers, examining the
relationship between their theorizing and
their compositions. The talks drew a devoted
following of early music enthusiasts. Other
visitors in the colloquium series in spring
2010 included two leading ethnomusicologists
from UCLA. “Toward an Ecology of
Musical Practice,” was the title of a talk by
Professor Anthony Seeger, former director
of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings at the
Smithsonian Institute, while Professor Tim
Rice presented “What and Where is Theory in
Ethnomusicology.”
This past fall, in a series of elegantly
crafted lectures, visiting Bloch Professor Peter
Franklin explored new perspectives on some
of the better and lesser known composers of
the early twentieth century, beginning with
Gustav Mahler and Claude Debussy, but also
giving Frederick Delius and Franz Schreker
careful attention. Cinematic use of symphonic
music by composers for Hollywood films of
the 1930s and 40s, together with what can
be viewed, in hindsight, as “protocinematic”
aspects of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury symphonic music were two of the
threads linking these lectures. Anxieties about
the boundary between high art and popular
culture in late Romantic music also figured
prominently.
We look forward to starting 2011 with
new oak flooring on the Hertz Hall stage,
carefully matched to the original in layout, cut,
and finish, but without the myriad scratches
and more serious holes that have marred our
stage for years. Together with the new choral
risers, which are lighter, less dangerous, and
less damaging to the stage, this refurbishment
will bring the hall back to former glory and
last, we hope, for decades to come. It remains a
fantastic setting to hear music of many flavors,
and when that music includes electronic
components or requires a little boost we are
fortunate to have excellent amplification,
thanks to the generosity of John and Helen
Meyer of Meyer Sound and to our excellent
audio technician Jay Cloidt.
In spring 2011 we are also looking
forward to a rich continuation of our two
Friday afternoon colloquia series. Composers
play and discuss recent work at 3pm; scholars
present their latest research at 4:30pm.
Composer Beat Furrer, who is the conductor
and founder of Klangforum Wien, a leading
European contemporary music ensemble, will
be visiting as a Regents’ Lecturer from January
24 to 28, to work with composition students
and present his work. In March and April we
will mark what would have been Professor
Andrew Imbrie’s ninetieth birthday with
concerts and a symposium (see page 3).
Academic year 2011–12 will bring us
two distinguished visitors: Composer and
theorist Fred Lerdahl, a professor at Columbia
University whose book A Generative Theory of
Tonal Music, (coauthored with Ray Jackendoff )
has been immensely influential, will be the
Bloch visiting professor in fall 2011. In spring
2012, the Bloch professor will be Georgina
Born, professor at Oxford University, who is
known for her study of musical institutions
(IRCAM in Paris and the BBC) and aspects
of technology and mediation. Both Lerdahl
and Born have enriched their work by drawing
on multiple disciplines (linguistics and
music theory in the first case, anthropology,
sociology, and musicology, in the second). As
we move ahead with a wealth of initiatives,
it is important also to think about preserving
local musical legacies and to remember people
who played key roles in shaping the contexts in
which we make, teach, and study music today.
Robert Commanday’s article in this issue
is one type of contribution to such efforts.
Another is the Andrew W. Imbrie Memorial
Fund, endowed by his widow Barbara Imbrie,
to benefit the Bay Area Composers Archive.
The archive, originally established by a major
donation from the late Jane Galante, already
includes the collections of several Bay Area
composers. This past October, 130 friends,
students, and colleagues attended a memorial
for our former chair, Wendy Allanbrook, at
the Faculty Club. Graduate students sang and
played works by Mozart, the composer who
figured most prominently in Prof. Allanbrook’s
research and publications.
Finally, in October 2009, we marked the
fiftieth anniversary of the death of composer
Ernest Bloch, who taught in our department
from 1940 to 1952, with a symposium, a
concert of his works, and an exhibit of his
immaculate scores in the Hargrove Music
Library and the foyer of Hertz Hall. The
performance competition on October 5
featured music majors and other Berkeley
students performing works by Bloch. First
prize winners were April Paik (violin), Jessica
Ling (violin), Jeff Kuo (viola), Kevin Yu
(cello) and Tony Lin (piano) performing the
Piano Quintet No. 2. Second prize winner
continued on page 3
page 2
E v e n t s ,
C e l e b r a t i o n s ,
V i s i t o r s
Andrew Imbrie Festival
T
o mark the ninetieth anniversary of Andrew Imbrie’s birth a series of concerts and a
symposium are scheduled to take place around the Bay Area in March and April of 2011.
A renowned composer, Imbrie (1921–2007) was a member of the Berkeley music faculty
from 1947 to 1991. The events of the Andrew Imbrie Festival coincide with the Hargrove Music
Library’s inauguration of a new special collection of books, scores, manuscripts, and archival
material from Andrew Imbrie’s personal collection, donated to the library by the Imbrie family.
WEDNESDAY APRIL 6, 12pm, Hertz Hall: Andrew Imbrie Birthday celebration
UC Berkeley’s University Symphony Orchestra, David Milnes, conductor, and Ariana Kim,
violin, perform Imbrie’s Violin Concerto at Hertz Hall. Admission is free.
SUNDAY APRIL 10, Imbrie festival events take place at the Department of Music,
UC Berkeley (free & open to the public):
• 11Am–1:15pm, 125 Morrison Hall: Symposium: Music of Andrew Imbrie
features Joseph Kerman, Robert Commanday, Dan Heartz, Olly Wilson, Fredric Lerdahl,
Richard Festinger, John Harbison, David Hoose and others in 125 Morrison Hall.
• 1:15–2:15pm: Reception on Hertz Hall terrace
• 3pm, Hertz Hall: a concert of Andrew Imbrie’s music
UC Berkeley’s Eco Ensemble performs with guests, including members of the Chamber
Music Society of Minnesota. The program includes his Piano Quartet, Spring Fever, Sextet for
Six Friends, and a new work in memory of Andrew Imbrie by Cindy Cox. Admission is free.
Professor Andrew Imbrie in classroom
Other events in this series honoring Andrew Imbrie include a Composers, Inc.
chamber music concert, featuring Jean-Michel Fonteneau, cello, and John Sackett,
clarinet, at Old First Church in San Francisco on Friday, March 25. A preview concert
featuring the Borromeo String Quartet at the Recital Hall, Music Center, UC Santa
Cruz on Friday, April 8, features works by Imbrie, Gunther Schuller, Hi Kyung Kim, & David
Evans Jones and on Saturday, April 9, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music presents an
Homage to Andrew Imbrie, chamber music concert featuring the Borromeo
Quartet and the SF Conservatory New Music Ensemble directed by Nicole Paiement.
The program includes From Time to Time, String Quartet No. 5, Chicago Bells, & Serenade.
Bloch Symposium speakers
Jonathan Elkus & Klara Moricz
EVENTS, CELEBRATIONS, VISITORS, continued from page 1
was pianist Elaine Laguerta, performing
Visions et Propheties, I & IV, for solo piano.
The symposium featured scholars Davitt
Moroney (UC Berkeley), speaking about the
history of the Department of Music, Klara
Moricz (Amherst University), who earned
her PhD at Berkeley and gave the keynote
address about the composer’s work America,
as well as graduate composer Nils Bultmann
(UC Berkeley) performing a new piece in
homage to Bloch, and Jonathan Elkus
(UC Davis) speaking on “Growing up with
Bloch.” Elkus’ father Albert was a friend of
Bloch’s, and chairman of the Department of
Music for many years. The concert in Hertz
Hall on October 10 featured cellist Irene
Sharp, pianist Betty Woo, soprano Deborah
Benedict, pianist Jeffrey Sykes and student
musicians mentioned above as well as pianist
Connie Kim. They performed works by
Bloch, including his Piano Quintet No. 2,
written for the opening of Hertz Hall in 1958.
In attendance at the symposium and concert
was the composer’s grandson, Ernest Bloch II.
Students perform Bloch’s Piano Quintet #2
F
eatured performers from the Berkeley Old-Time Music Convention, held
each September, visit the Dept. of Music to sing, play, and speak about their involvement in
traditional American music. Veteran folk singer and fiddler Alice Gerard appeared with young
ballad singer Elizabeth LaPrelle and her mother Sandy LaPrelle before an audience of students,
faculty, and community members in September 2009, while Gerard returned in September 2010,
joined this time by Eric and Susie Thompson and members of the Macrae Sisters band, with
ProfessorTamara Roberts moderating.
page 3
Holley Replogle–Wong, faculty fellow
F a c u l t y
Faculty Update
U p d a t e
Jocelyne Guilbault was invited to give keynote addresses for
Ben Brinner became Chair of the Department of Music in July
2009. His book Playing Across a Divide: Israeli-Palestinian Musical
Encounters, based on fieldwork in Israel and the West Bank over a
period of fifteen years, was published by Oxford University Press in
November 2009. The Society for Ethnomusicology awarded it the 2010
Alan P. Merriam Prize for Outstanding Book in Ethnomusicology.
Brinner returned to Israel in spring 2009 to initiate a new project on
the professional network of Arab musicians in Israel. In summer 2009
he returned to Indonesia to continue a long-term project on how
musicians in Bali and Java memorize and recall gamelan compositions.
He intends to continue this project with the support of the Henry and
Julia Weisman Schutt Chair in Music which he was awarded in 2010.
Edmund Campion The San Francisco Contemporary
Music Players and Albany Records recently released Outside
Music, a solo CD of Edmund Campion’s music. Saxophonist
Susan Fancher released a new recording of the piece Corail (Coral)
to critical acclaim. Professor Campion’s new composition 600
Seconds in the Old Model, commissioned by Radio France and
published by Billaudot Editions in Paris, was premiered by the
Zellig Ensemble at the Festival Presence in Metz in February ‘09.
The Argento Ensemble premiered his digital piano concerto with
17 instruments and computer at the Moving Sounds Festival in
New York. Current projects include a Koussevitzky Foundation
Commission for The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.
Cindy Cox’s Turner for viola and piano was commissioned by
Composers’ Inc for their 25th Anniversary season, and was premiered
by violist Ellen Ruth Rose with Cox at the piano in San Francisco in
the Green Room of the War Memorial Building in October. Her En
círculo, for eight performers, was commissioned by the San Francisco
Contemporary Music Players and premiered at the ODC Dance
Commons and the Herbst Theater in San Francisco in February under
the direction of David Milnes, also with Cox at the piano. Her Sylvan
pieces for solo piano was premiered by Cox at the Garden of Memory
solstice concert in June at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland and
will be performed again at Berkeley in a noon concert in September.
Pianist Soojin Bae performed Cox’s Hierosgamos at Carnegie Hall in
June, and pianist Oni Buchanan performed The blackbird whistling
just after on a national tour, with over fifteen performances across
the US. The blackbird whistling was also performed by pianist Kate
Ryder in London at Morley College in November. Flutist Ivan Bellocq
performed The Other Side of the World for flute and electronics at
the Festival Architecture et Musique in Angers, France in March,
and The New Music Ensemble at Towson University in Maryland
performed Axis Mundi for amplified sextet with electronics in October.
A new recording of Cox’s The Other Side of the World was released
by flutist Laurel Zucker, Inflorescence IV: Music for solo flute.
the International conference on Multiculturalism in the Arts and for
the Society of Ethnomusicology in Finland and for the Association of
Cultural Studies in the United States. She also gave talks in St. Louis,
Missouri and in Kingston, Jamaica. She organized the first meeting of
a series entitled “Popular Music Studies on Campus” at UC Berkeley
to foster multidisciplinary exchanges among scholars involved in this
research domain. Since 2008, she has been serving on the Executive
Council of the Caribbean Studies Association. She has just completed
two articles and is currently working on two book projects, one on
writing music history through a Trinidadian musician’s journey, and
the other on what is provisionally entitled Music, Politics, and Pleasure.
Marika Kuzma returned from Montreal in the fall of 2008,
where she was the chorusmaster for the Montreal Symphony for the
2007–08 season. That same fall, the symphony released the recording
Beethoven: Ideals of the French Revolution (Analekta records) for which
she prepared the chorus. She was invited to prepare the MSO chorus
for their performances of the Bach St. Matthew Passion in the fall of
2009 as well and maintains contact with many of the singers and
musicians there. Back in Berkeley, she has resumed a full teaching
schedule with the University Chorus and Chamber Chorus (information
on their recent concerts page 13). She looks forward to completing
her edition of the Dmitry Bortniansky choral concertos this year.
Michael Seth Orland, who teaches musicianship and
piano for the Music Department, was selected as a participant in the
Lecturer Teaching Fellows Program at Berkeley for the academic year
2009–10. The program provides lecturers an opportunity to meet
regularly with colleagues from across campus to discuss teaching
issues. Approximately ten to fifteen lecturers are selected annually.
Holley Replogle-Wong comes to UC Berkeley as an
ACLS New Faculty Fellow. Holley earned her PhD in musicology at
University of California, Los Angeles in 2009, with a dissertation on
American cultural hierarchies in operetta and the megamusical. In
2007, she was awarded the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Assistant
Award, which came with a UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship.
She was also a recipient of the UCLA Research Mentorship
Fellowship and the Phi Beta Kappa Pauline Venable Turrill Award
for her work on 19th-century operetta. Her publications include
“Coming of Age in Wartime: American Propaganda and Patriotic
Nationalism in Yankee Doodle Dandy,” published in Echo: A
Music Centered Journal, and a contribution on musical theater
stars and fans for the forthcoming book Keywords for the American
Musical on Stage and Screen from Oxford University Press.
Holley’s research interests include topics in musical theater, voice,
fandom, 19th- and 20th-century American cultural hierarchies, classical
crossover, and film and video game music. She is also an avid performer,
singing with the Angeles Chorale, with the Burbank-based professional
caroling company The Voices of Christmas, and on the soundtracks
continued on page 5
Faculty members Nicholas Mathew and James Davies accompany singers on the 1854 Erard piano at the Schumann concert honoring Jean Gray Hargrove.
page 4
F a c u l t y
U p d a t e
•
P i a n o s
FACULTY UPDATE—continued from page 4
for The Rebel, Mysterious World, and Clash. Recent theater work
includes performances in The Secret Garden and Thoroughly Modern
Millie at the Morgan-Wixson Theater in Santa Monica. While in
residence at UC Berkeley, Holley will be teaching courses on musical
theater, film music, and classical crossover while working on a book
project stemming from her previous work on musical theater and
crossover genres, which will form the basis for further exploration of
American cultural hierarchies, performance practices, and audience
reception and fandom in relation to the classical crossover industry.
Professor Tamara Roberts composed music for Mango Street,
a new theatrical adaptation of Sandra Cisneros’s novel The House
On Mango Street. The show is going up this fall at Steppenwolf
Theatre in Chicago. Tracing the coming-of-age of Esperanza, the
score features songs and instrumental music evoking the panLatino sounds of late 70s/early 80s Chicago. Here is a link: http://
www.steppenwolf.org/boxoffice/productions/index.aspx?id=480.
In 2010–11 Mary Ann Smart is on sabbatical, writing the last
chapters of her book on opera and politics in early nineteenth-century
Italy. In October she presented material from the book’s last chapter-—
examining the role of Verdi’s operas in shaping Italian identity in the
1840s—at a conference in Budapest, Hungary. A section of another
chapter, on songs about Italy written by Italian exile composers living in
Paris, was published in the journal 19th-Century Music (Summer 2010).
Smart has also begun work on a new project, which studies changing
styles of operatic production since 1960. She has presented parts of this
new book as keynote speaker at the University of Toronto’s Operatics
conference in 2009, at the conference on “Wagner in Los Angeles:
The Opera of the 21st Century” at UCLA’s Hammer Museum in June
2010, and in invited lectures at Harvard University, the Eastman School
of Music, and the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University.
In 2010 Smart joined the advisory board of the Zentrum für
Genderforschung at the Kunst-Universität in Graz, Austria.
Assistant Professor of Composition Ken Ueno recently released a
portrait CD Talus of three orchestral concertos on BMOP/sound. One
of the tracks features Ueno as the soloist on his concerto for throat
singer. During the past academic year, he had over 50 performances of
his music worldwide. Highlights from the season include performances
at the Manca Festival in Nice with the San Francisco Contemporary
Players, on which he performed as soloist; performances of by Kim
Kashkashian in Germany and Spain; and a premiere at the Kennedy
Center. In April, Ueno sang with the acclaimed cellist Joan Jeanrenaud
at the Berkeley Art Museum. He is also the recipient of the 2010–2011
Berlin Prize, and will be in residence at the American Academy in Berlin.
This year Professor Kate van Orden keynoted the 34th
Annual International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Music
in Utrecht, The Netherlands. She announced the discovery of a
Renaissance music library with her collaborator, Alfredo Vitolo, at the
International Musicological Society conference in Amsterdam, and spoke
at a symposium on John Dunstaple at the Cini Foundation in Venice.
She also gave invited lectures at the American Philosophical Society in
Philadelphia and the Catholic University of America in Washington
D.C. She has published this year in the Journal of Women’s History and
Renaissance Quarterly, and is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Journal
of the American Musicological Society. Her concert performances on
baroque and classical bassoon included Bay Area venues and Houston.
Bonnie Wade finished her term as chair of the Department
of Music on June 30, 2009. During the 2008-2009 academic
year she also completed revisions for the second edition of her
very successful book, Thinking Musically. Experiencing Music,
Expressing Culture (Oxford University Press, 2nd edition). The
Oxford Global Music Series, for which she is co-General Editor,
continues apace with 27 volumes published or under contract.
During 2009–2010 Wade was on sabbatical in the fall term working
on a draft of her monograph on contemporary music in Japan. She
returned to teaching in the spring semester. In March she served as
a panelist for the Pew Charitable Trust Awards in the Arts for the
Philadelphia Music Project. She gave the Rey Longyear Distinguished
Lecture at the University of Kentucky in April and a lecture in the
Distinguished Musicology Series at UCLA, also in April. Both talks were
based on research for her monograph. In February, Wade signed on with
Oxford University Press to be the Associate Editor for Ethnomusicology
in its new Oxford Bibliography Online Series for Music. And she
continues as Chair of the faculty Group in Asian Studies at UC Berkeley.
page 5
Pianos
The Wieck Piano Project This year, the
Music Department received a generous donation from the
family of Heather Blair—a piano dating from 1860, built
by Wilhelm Wieck of Dresden. Musicians and musiclovers associate the name “Wieck” with the celebrated
piano virtuoso Clara Schumann, wife of Robert, who
was Wilhelm’s cousin and, indeed, owned a Wieck
instrument herself. Only eight of these remarkably fine
pianos are extant today—including a famous example
in the Schumann-Haus in Zwickau— and still fewer
are in playing condition. Our Wieck is the only one in
the United States, a particularly lovely example of the
craftsmanship of the Dresden workshop. With its glowing
rosewood veneer, it is just the sort of elegant object that
would have graced nineteenth-century salons. Its straight
stringing produces a shimmering Romantic sound, even
as its sturdy English action generates considerable power.
The piano is in need of restoration at an estimated
cost of $6000. At the moment it is fitted out with modern
hammers, for instance, which are far too large and heavy
for so subtle an instrument. New hammers, modeled on
those in the Wieck piano belonging to the SchumannHaus in Zwickau, will need to be built and installed.
For more information about how you can help us
recover the voice of this rare and exquisite instrument
please contact the Music Department Manager, Roia
Ferrazares ([email protected]), at 104 Morrison Hall,
510.643.8722. Checks may be made out to “UC Regents/
Music Department,” marked “For Wieck Piano Project,”
and sent to the Department of Music, 104 Morrison Hall
#1200, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.
—Nicholas Mathew
Our newly restored 1854 Erard
piano has been heard in concert several times
over the past year. Sezi Seskir visited from Cornell
University in spring 2010 to give
a concert and workshop with this
piano (see Seskir concert photo
on bottom of page 16). It was
brought into Hertz Hall again
for the Schumann bicentennial
concert in October 2010,
when a succession of faculty
and students sat around the
piano on stage as if they were
in a nineteenth-century salon.
The latter concert was also an
opportunity to commemorate
the pianist Jean Gray Hargrove (see page6). Fortepiano
expert Malcolm Bilson, brought to us courtesy of the
Townsend Center, conducted a master class and gave
a concert on the department’s Regier fortepiano in
spring 2010.
Alumni News
Graduate student Alumni
Marié Abe, (PhD, Ethnomusicology,
2010) completed her dissertation,
“Sounding Counter-Geographies: Chindonya Resurgence and Japan’s “Multicultural
Question,” and was awarded a post-doctoral
position at Harvard.
Jean Ahn (PhD, Composition, 2008)
completed her composition, Salt for
orchestra.
Shalini Ayyagari (PhD,
Ethnomusicology, 2009) is beginning a
two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship
in the Humanities at Dartmouth College,
and recently filed her dissertation entitled,
Small Voices Sing Big Songs: The Politics
of Emerging Institutional Spaces Among
Manganiyar Musicians in Rajasthan, India.”
Brian Banks (PhD, Composition,
1995) Professor Titular, Depto.de Artes,
Uhiv. de las Americas, Puebla Cholula,
Mexico had six premiere performances
in in 2009. In addition, both he and
Dwight Banks (PhD, Composition,
2003) were selected to have a chamber
orchestral work performed by the North/
South Chamber Orchestra of New York
last spring.
Eliot Bates (PhD, Ethnomusicology,
2008) finished a two-year position as visiting assistant professor at the University
of Maryland and took up a two-year
ACLS post-doctoral position at Cornell
University. His book Music in Turkey
appeared in the Global Music textbook
series edited by Professor Bonnie Wade.
Mason Bates (PhD, Composition,
2008) composed The B sides, commissioned and premiered by the San Francisco
Symphony in the their regular season at
Davies Hall. The 2011 centennial celebration of the San Francisco Symphony, led
by music director Michael Tilson Thomas,
includes his compositions. Riccardo Muti
conducts the Chicago Symphony featuring
a commissioned work by Bates in February
2011. As part of the “American Mavericks”
festival in March, Michael Tilson Thomas
conducts the world premiere of Bates’ Mass
Trasmission for electronica and chorus.
Fernando Benadon (PhD,
Composition, 2004) received a
Guggenheim Fellowship for 2009–10. He
is a member of the Music Department
faculty of American University. Fernando
just released a new CD on Innova Record.
Information and audio tracks are available
for listening on the CNMAT web site at:
http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/node/8076.
Rebecca Bodenheimer (PhD,
Ethnomusicology, 2010) was selected for a
post-doctoral position at Hamilton College
in New Hartford, New York. Her dissertation: “Localizing Hybridioty: the Politics
of Place in Contemporary Cuban Rumba
Performance”
Thomas Brothers (PhD, History
& Literature, 1991), Professor of Music
at Duke University, was awarded a 2009
Guggenheim Fellowship in Folklore and
Popular Culture. His 2007 book entitled
Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans continues to
receive received high critical acclaim.
Esther Criscuola De Laix (PhD,
History & Literature, 2009) completed
her dissertation, Cultures of Music Print in
Hamburg, ca. 1550–1630.
Mark DeWitt (PhD,
Ethonomusiciology,1999) was selected for
an endowed chair in traditional music at
the University of Louisiana at Lafayette,
where he has been asked to create a new
continued on page 7
I n
M e m o r i a m
In Memoriam
I
n recent years the department has suffered the loss of former
colleagues, including faculty emerita Wye J. (Wendy) Allanbrook,
music library donor Jean Gray Hargrove, and staff members Nancy
Cooley and Paulette Powell.
Wendy Allanbrook (1943 – 2010) was born in
Hagerstown, Maryland, and passed away on July 15, 2010 from cancer.
She graduated from Vassar College with a degree in classics. She earned a
Ph.D. in music history from Stanford University in 1974. Her doctoral
dissertation became the basis for the book Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart
(University of Chicago Press, 1983), in which she demonstrated that
Mozart’s music integrated references to the social practices and dances
of his period. She wrote that this is what gave the music its tremendous
power to “move audiences through representations of its own humanity.”
Wendy’s work has influenced stagings of Mozart operas and provides a standard critical tool
for opera studies today. Her book The Secular Commedia: Comic Mimesis in Late 18th-Century
Music is near completion, and will be published by the University of California Press.
From 1969 to 1995, Wendy taught at St. John’s College in Maryland. She served as assistant
dean from 1987 to 1990 and again from 1992–94. She joined the faculty at the University of
California, Berkeley in 1994 as the Ernest Bloch Visiting Professor of Music and was made a
permanent member of the faculty in 1995. She was chair of the department from 1997 to 2003,
during which time she oversaw the construction of the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library.
She received numerous awards and fellowships, including those from the National Humanities
Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies,
and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2008, Wendy received the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation Emeritus Fellowship. She was elected president of the American Musicological
Society in 2003, but had to resign during her first year in office because of the onset of cancer.
She is survived by a son, John Allanbrook of New York, a stepson, Timothy
Allanbrook of New York, and two sisters, Stephanie Jamison Watkins, of Los
Angeles, and Martha Page Martineau of Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
The Department of Music at Berkeley has established a fund in Wendy’s honor as
a way to remember her very special contributions to musicology and the department.
Memorial contributions may be made to the Wendy Allanbrook Memorial Fund c/o Roia
Ferrazares, 104 Morrison Hall, Department of Music, UC Berkeley 94720-1200.
Jean Gray Hargrove (1914–2010) died peacefully at her home in the Berkeley
hills at age 96. Jean attended Santa Rosa public schools and graduated from U.C. Berkeley majoring
in education. Starting as a child piano prodigy, music was Jean’s passion as she was an accomplished
concert pianist and was active with many Bay Area musical groups such as the Berkeley Piano Club
and Senza Ritmo and was a guest performer with the San Francisco Federal, Oakland and Santa Rosa
symphonies. She married Dr. G. Kenneth Hargrove in 1937 and lived her adult life in Berkeley.
Together they raised 5 children: Elizabeth Hargrove (Lou Slater), Dr. Gary Hargrove (Jane Mattson
Hargrove), Marilyn Hargrove Berkey (Dan Berkey), Dean Hargrove and Roberta Hargrove. From
her love of music and of Cal Berkeley and sharing the fruits of wise investment decisions by her late
husband, she was enabled to sponsor the new music
library at UC Berkeley which is named in her
honor. Jean was known for her passion for language
and literature and was a whiz at crossword puzzles
and the Saturday Review double-crostic. She also
was an excellent hostess and family gatherings
at her gracious home were wonderful to attend
with spontaneous musical presentations by family
members.
Jean is predeceased by her husband and by
her parents, Martin and Elizabeth Gray (nèe
Kohler). She is survived by her 5 children, 11
grandchildren, 13 great grandchildren, her brother
Dr. Donald Gray, and her lifelong friend, Carol
Upshaw. The family extends particular thanks
to her caregivers especially Lisa Moan, and Luis
Gonzales. Per her wishes, Jean’s ceremony of
life was arranged through the Neptune Society
of Northern California. Donations in her name
may be to the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library,
104 Morrison Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720.
page 6
I n
M e m o r i a m
Alumni News
continued from page 6
IN MEMORIAM—continued from page 6
Paulette Powell (1954–2009) Paulette and I took
our seats in the office of the Department of Music at the University of
California, Berkeley at just about the same time—she as the Management
Services Officer in charge of the staff, the buildings and a million other
things, and I as the academic Chair of the department. For me it was a
return to familiar responsibilities from an earlier stint (although much
had changed), but for Paulette it was an enormous challenge. So much
was new for her. Yes, she was still in academic administration, but the
Berkeley campus and its culture were entirely new to her.
In the department there was a wholly new set of personalities—
artistic types rather than medical and the curriculum that she helped to
manage was entirely unfamiliar. She was to supervise a staff of individuals
who were and are very capable individuals but who were reeling from
years of carrying on through the illness of Paulette’s predecessor and
then from the retirement of those with the longest memories of the
place. The staff person in charge of academic personnel decided to take an opportunity in another
department to rise to the position of MSO herself, leaving Paulette with both her complex new job and
all our complex academic personnel processes to carry out. As if that were not enough, the department
was reviewed in that year—for the first time in fourteen years, requiring endless fact-finding and
analysis and documentation. So much had to be sorted out and there was so very much to learn
One day several months into that first year as Paulette cleared her desk at leaving time, she seemed
especially tired and I dared—yes, dared, because we all know how private a person she was—to ask if
she could rest when she left work, or if she took work with her as some high-ranking administrators
do. Well, she decided to reveal to me that every night she went from work to visit her mother whose
health had recently caused a move to a nursing facility. She expressed great concern about her father
too. She asked me not to tell anyone in the department about those personal matters. I did not,
but with that door opened, I was allowed to inquire about things periodically. It was a privilege.
That was just the first year. In the two next years we were to experience the sudden death of two
young members of the faculty and figure out how to take the department community through that.
A new personnel officer was hired, but that person became ill and for periods between temporary
persons, Paulette had to resume those responsibilities. There was never an easy moment in that “new”
job and she soldiered on—managing brilliantly. In the meantime, her health began to be troublesome.
Only I was permitted to know the details—and that perhaps because I am a cancer survivor myself,
but the staff again stepped up to the plate and shouldered what needed to be done. They—along
with the faculty, respected and appreciated Paulette and understood her desire for privacy.
We in the Department of Music knew Paulette Powell to be a capable, intelligent, courageous,
and caring person. I personally was indeed privileged to experience for four years a rare sort of
professional interdependence with her until my term as Chair ended last June. At that point
we still had hope for her improving health. That it should have conquered her just doesn’t
“seem like Paulette.” We shall miss her and offer deep condolences to family and friends.
—Bonnie Wade
Nancy Cooley (1958–2009) joined the Music
Department team in March 2006. She brought with her years of
experience gained while at the Music Department at San Francisco
State University. She also brought an infectious sense of humor,
a winning smile, and a dedication to her work. Among the many
contributions she made to the department, Nancy was instrumental
in the hiring process of several of our newer professors. She also helped
standardize the faculty and GSI evaluation process.
Nancy enjoyed doing Sudoku and crossword puzzles and could often
be seen about campus during the noon hour, sitting in the sun, working
on a puzzle. She drove a sports car and reveled in all things Hello Kitty.
Cats were special to her and she helped care for homeless cats in her
neighborhood even going so far as adopting two feral kittens. She loved to
laugh, wore clothes that were fun, and would take any occasion to bake a
cake for someone. Nancy had a big heart, and as she would say, “We mean that in the best possible way!”
Her friends here in the department miss her. Nancy passed away in May 2009.
—Jim Coates
page 7
BA program and an interdisciplinary research
center in traditional music. While Cajun and
Creole dance music from the region will play
a prominent part in this new endeavor, he
writes, there will be room for a far greater
range of musical expression and scholarly
inquiry.
Aaron Einbond (PhD, Composition,
2009) recently completed two years of the
Cursus in Music Composition and Technology
at IRCAM, culminating in the premiere of
his work What the Blind See for five instruments, electronics, & video by Ensemble
l’Instant Donné at the CentQuatre in Paris
as part of IRCAM’s Agora Festival. His stay
was supported by a Fulbright Scholarship &
UC Berkeley’s Georges Ladd Prix de Paris.
He simultaneously completed his DEM studies with Philippe Leroux. Recent works &
performances include the premiere of Starting
Over for contrabass recorder and electronics
by Antonio Politano in Lausanne, Switzerland;
Break for baritone saxophone & electronics at
the World Saxophone Conference in Bangkok
by Jérôme Laran; the sound installation What
the Blind See at the Akademie der Künste in
Berlin; & Beside Oneself for viola & electronics
selected for performances at the International
Computer Music Conference in Montréal
& the Seoul International Computer Music
Festival. He composed a new work for the
Ensemble Cairn that was premiered at the
Darmstadt Summer School in 2010. Aaron
is finishing his second year on a post-doc to
Columbia University and has been commissioned to write a new work for the Ensemble
Recherce & Freibrug Barockorchester for 2011
Pattie Hsu (PhD, Ethnomusicology, 2010)
completed her dissertation, Living Taiwanese
Opera: Improvisation, Performance of Gender,
and Selection of Tradition.
Lisa Jakelski (PhD, History & Literature,
2009) completed her dissertation, The
Changing Seasons of the Warsaw Autumn:
Contemporary Music in Poland, 1960–1990;
she has accepted a position as Assistant
Professor of Musicology at the Eastman
School of Music.
Alexander Kahn (PhD, H&L, 2009)
completed his dissertation, Double Lives:
Emigre Composers in Los Angeles, and was
recently appointed Director of Orchestral
Activities at the Sunderman Conservatory of
Music at Gettysburg College.
Mei-Fang Lin (PhD, Composition, 2007)
accepted a tenure track position in music
composition at Texas Tech University.
Keeril Makan (PhD, Composition,
2004) was promoted to Associate Professor at
MIT and awarded the Lister Brothers Career
Development Chair. Keeril was the Composer
in Residence at the Carlsbad New Music
Festival and was the featured composer at the
Musica Nova Festival in Helsinki, Finland.
John-Carlos Perea (PhD,
Ethnomusicology, 2009) completed his
dissertation, Witchi Tai To: An Historical
Acoustemology.
William Quillen (PhD, History &
Literature, 2010) In November 2008, several
UCB graduate student composers performed
at the Moscow Autumn festival in Moscow,
Russia. The participating Berkeley composers were Aaron Einbond, Evelyn
Ficarra, & Heather Frasch.
Richard DudaS , (PhD, Composition,
1998) also participate in the festival, & taught
a masterclass at the Moscow Conservatory.
One of the closing concerts, entitled
“Berkeley-Moscow: A New Generation in
Electroacoustic Music” featured music by
Berkeley’s four composers plus new works by
continued on page 8
Alumni News
F u n d r a i s i n g
six composers from the Moscow Conservatory,
with performances by the Moscow
Conservatory’s Studio for New Music, one of
Russia’s leading new music ensembles. The
concert was co-organized by Igor Kefalidis,
a professor at the Moscow Conservatory and
director of the conservatory’s Electroacoustic
Center, and William Quillen. Quillen
recently completed his dissertation, “After the
End: New Music in Russia from Perestroika to
the Present.”
Matt Rahaim (PhD, Ethnomusicology,
2009) accepted a position as assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. His dissertation: Gesture, Melody, and the Paramparic
Body in Hindustani Vocal Music.
Christina Schiffner (PhD, History
& Literature, 2009) completed her dissertation, Singing Silence, Silencing Noise: Rossini’s
Opere Serie for Naples, 1815–1822.
Arman Schwartz (PhD, History &
Literature, 2009) completed his dissertation,
Modernity Sings: Rethinking Realism in Italian
Opera.
Laura Schwendinger (PhD,
Composition, 1993) who was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, was the
recipient of a 2009 Goddard Liberson
Fellowship from the American Academy
of Arts and Letters. She is an Associate
Professor of Composition at the Univ. of
Wisconsin-Madison and Artistic Director of
the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble.
Noel Orillo Verzosa (PhD, History
& Literature, 2009) completed his dissertation, The Absolute Limits: Debussy, Satie,
and the Culture of French Modernism, ca.
1860–1920.
Trevor Weston (PhD, Composition,
1997) who achieved tenure at the College
of Charleston, has been appointed to Drew
University in New Jersey as Associate
Professor of Music. He began his appointment in September 2009. Last January, his
composition Truth Tones for Choir and
Violoncello was performed by the Boston
Children’s Chorus at historic Jordan Hall in
the New England Conservatory of Music as
part of the 2009 Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr.
Concert. This performance was featured on
a live national telecast, broadcast to over 200
affiliate stations across the nation at different times during the months of January and
February 2009.
Christopher Williams (PhD,
History & Literature, 2008) completed his
dissertation, Mahler, Schoenberg, and the
Trasmission of Musical Stylegraduate Alumni
U n de rg r a d uat e A lum n i
Pheaross Graham (2009) will be
attending UC Irvine this fall for his graduate
studies in Piano Performance. He was accepted to other schools as well with scholarships,
including the Cleveland Institute of Music.
Joyce Kwon (2009) has been spending
the past 5 weeks teaching basic music theory
& keyboard to indigenous people in the
upper Rio Negro region of the Amazon, as
well as performing songs from her singer/
songwriter album at various villages there.
Clarissa Lyons (2006), who studied
with Deborah Benedict while she was at
Berkeley, completed a Master’s in Voice from
the Manhattan School of Music in May. At
the Manhattan School of Music she performed in the New York premiere of John
Musto’s opera Later the Same Evening based
on paintings by Edward Hopper and the
continued on page 10
Please Give to Music
Y
our gift to the Department of Music can significantly enhance the education of our students,
the concert experience of our audiences, and the research and publication possibilities of our
faculty and students. We invite you to be our partner in the following endeavors
Performance
The performance experience and study is integrated into every aspect of the academic program-whether the honing of musicianship skills or the acquisition of knowledge of theory and history
and literature of European and diverse other traditions, or the study of contemporary cultural life in
America and elsewhere. How does that happen?
• History and ethnomusicology lecture courses are infused with lecture
demonstrations by eminent performers or complemented by a semester-long
performance lab through which all students receive performance instruction.
• Theory and composition students hear their creative work played and sung.
• Improvisation courses expand the horizons of students interested
in jazz and other improvisatory traditions.
• Performance ensembles provide students the discipline and
joy of experiencing music with other musicians.
• Our most skilled undergraduate music majors are provided private instruction
with distinguished Bay Area artists in order to further hone their craft.
• A gift to performance may contribute to the instrument purchase and maintenance,
purchase and rental of scores, music lessons, or master classes offered by local artists,
for example. You may designate your support to one of our performance ensembles,
to the piano endowment to further piano instruction, or to the Department’s
performance endowment, which supports all our performance needs.
Faculty
A
s the best public university in the world, UC Berkeley is founded upon an unwavering
dedication to innovation and excellence in research and a commitment to teaching and
advancing knowledge at the highest level of scholarship. The Department of Music hires some of
the best faculty in the world. Private support has proven to be key to hiring - and also retaining our stellar faculty. Gift opportunities to support our excellent faculty range from research funding
to endowing a chair.
Capital Improvements: Morrison Hall Renovation
W
ith more than 500 students participating in a performance group or ensemble annually,
providing performance space—our “laboratories”—is critical to our educational mission.
The Department’s first priority is to renovate the space in Morrison Hall that once contained the
music library to be practice space for the department’s large and small ensembles, allowing much
needed relief to Hertz Hall.
Chair’s Discretionary Fund
C
an’t decide which of these goals is the worthiest? Consider donating to the Chair’s
Discretionary Fund which provides resources to be used to meet the Department’s most
urgent needs: better audio equipment for performances, recording sessions, or teaching purposes;
individual guest speakers or symposia; master classes; hiring professional musicians to perform
student works; and any other activities to support the educational mission of the department.
If you would like more information about how to support the department, please contact
us at 510-643-8722.
Graduate support has been bolstered
dramatically in the past two years as payout from
three different endowments have become available.
A bequest from Dorothy L. and Raymond C.
Grassi will fund several graduate students each
year, while endowments established by Prof.
Daniel Heartz and the late Prof. Walter “Ted”
Rex will support graduate summer research.
Graduates at commencement ceremony, 2010
page 8
M u s i c
D o n o r s
•
H e a v y
L i f t e r s
DONORS TO THE DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC
all gifts benefiting the music department between 7/1/2005–7/19/2010
MAJOR MAESTRA
& MAESTRO
$ 1 ,0 0 0 ,0 0 0 & a b o v e
Dorothy L. & Raymond C. Grassi**
SUPER SHAPERS:
$ 2 5 0 ,0 0 0 – 4 9 9 ,0 0 0
Leone S. McGowan*
G R E AT G I V E R S :
$ 1 0 0 ,0 0 0 – 2 4 9 ,9 9 9
Jacqueline Hardester*
Zaullie P. Cooper*
Ann G. & Gordon P. Getty
Carl D. Jacobs
STELLAR SUPPORTERS:
$ 5 0 ,0 0 0 – 9 9 ,0 0 0
Daniel L. Heartz
Joan Lam
Walter E. Rex, III*
Eugenie Schutt*
H. Colin Slim
Mr. & Mrs. Roger W. Souza**
PROMINENT
PERFORMERS:
$ 2 5 ,0 0 0 – 4 9 ,0 0 0
Mr. Frank Tatko
FA I T H F U L F R I E N D S :
$ 1 0 ,0 0 0 – 2 4 ,9 9 9
Sarah B. Noonberg & Mark A. Richards
Doris Foreaker Aitken
Nan B. Bentley
Enid M. Emerson
Karen Flint
Ellen Grogan & Bruce H. Kramer
Georg Hajdu
Mabel L. Muller*
Mr. & Mrs. Martin J. Schwager**
Aina E. Summerfelt
John Taylor
Margaret W. Thow
BENEFICIENT
B E N E FA C TO R S :
$ 5 ,0 0 0 – 9 ,9 9 9
Guenther & Ursel Braun
Arville B. & Herbert L. Damner, Jr.
Barbara C. & Andrew W. Imbrie*
Claude Alan Mason
Gail C. & Martha N. Rogers
Andrew A. & Mary Lou W. Stern*
C A R I N G C O N T R I B U TO R S :
$ 1 ,0 0 0 – 4 ,9 9 9
Eileen M. Belding
Mr. & Mrs. Sidney L. Ancker**
Louise B. Bidwell
Karl G. & Vera Blume
Anne P. Bonaparte & G. Judd Williams
David C. Carlson & Judy S. Tsou
Diana J. Cohen & William A. Falik
Jonathan B. & Marilyn Elkus
Raymond K. & Sally K. Fisher
Jean B. & John E. Hearst
Marc A. & Keiko M. Hentell*
Erica P. Levenson
Raymond Lifchez
Dorothy C. Lowry
Wallace I. Matson
Myra J. Melford
Julius J. Menn & Dianne Sagner
David P. Oster
Elda & Richard Phillips
Neal L. & Suzanne Y. Pierce
Kathryn Roark
Pamela H. Rosenberg
Milton & Sondra Schlesinger
Donna E. & Henry D. Strunk
Melinda A. Taylor
Virginia Troyer & David L. Zicarelli
Diane S. Velasco
Stephen D. Wong
Noel S. & Robert H. Yue*
D E D I C AT E D D O N O R S :
$500 – 999
James P. IV* & Lillie L. Anderson
Christina & Richard P. Ambrosini
Wayne A. Jr. & Michele M. Belshaw
Anna Y. Chang
Quongchee Chen & Xin Ming Liu
Joy A. Chuck
David E. Claridge & Martha L. Wasley
Alice M. Corning
Joanne De Phillips
Alexander Dea
Judith Deis & Tony S. Taylor
Connie G. & Philip A. Erickson
Rev. Richard G. Fabian
Dean W. Grinsfelder
David A. Hoffman & Joan E. Sarnat
Rosamund & Scott Jones
Thomas A. Koster
Jeffrey T. Kuo
Michael G. Kushell
Allan J. & Elizabeth A. Lichtenberg
Charles & Helene Linker
Gregory C. Moore
Margaret Petzel
Kenneth H. & Marjorie Sauer
Helga H. Shareshian
Susan E. Strunk& Terry F. Finkel
Inge A. & Karel Svoboda
Andrea J. & Stephen G. Turner
Jennifer A. Wang
Betty K. Woo
Thomas C. Yiu & Fiona Siu
A rts A ppreciators :
$2 5 0 – 4 9 9
Byram S. Abbott
Todd A. Angstadt
Alan M. & Helen C. Appleford
Edward L. & Robin E. Blum
Stephen V. Bomse & Edith P. Silber
Thomas M. Bosserman
Winifred A. Bradbury
Joannie O. Chiu
Robert W. Cole& Susan Muscarella
Gail L. & Robert S. Dunham
Lewis J. Feldman
Richard C. Fessler
Bruce & Elizabeth D. Friend
Christina M. & John R. Gillis
Jack Gipsman
Judith S. & Patrick M. Hanlon
Barbara A. & Lee Hieronymus
Daniel C. Huang
Adeline F. & Stanley S. Kahn
Shira L. Kammen
Julie M. Kennedy
Birthe K. & Jack F. Kirsch
Betty L. & Larry C. Kwong
Gerald S. & Lora B. Levin
Joann R. & Martin H. Lorber
Susan T. Lucas
Clarence M. & Marita P. McClymonds
Davitt Moroney
Laurence S. & Vicki S. Oppenheim
Frieda H. & Paul M. Schwartz
Margaret F. & Truman E. Siverts*
Antoinette R. Thomas
Shi-Chin Y. Tsai
Louis Weil
ENTHUSIASTIC
ENCOURAGERS:
$50 – 2 4 9
Lani E. Allen
Andrea Amey
Carol K. & Kevin A. Anderson
Jane S. Anderson
Melanie J. Anderson
Stephen P. Andrews, Jr.
Simon W. Andrews
David M. & Vivian Auslander
Richard Bagwell
German Baldeon & Doris Knapp
Patrice E. Ballinger
James S. Baum & Carol West
Laurence L. & Bruce M. Beasley
Linda H. & Richard G. Beidleman
Arrigo Benedetti
David M. Berke, II
Cynthia F. Berrol
Charles & Hope H. Boije
Mary E. Bolt
Jane M. Bowers
Armen & Evelyn C. Boyd
Elizabeth Brown
Elizabeth S. Brown
Mickey L. Butts
Richard M. Buxbaum & Catherine B.
Hartshorn
Delma Campbell
J. D. & Margaret M. Carpenter
Edith D. Carrigan & Victor Rivasplata
Nancy Cerveris
Ching J. Chang
Da-Jin Chang
Colin & Joy Charles
Yoon Y. Choe
David P. Chow
Renee J. Chow
Clifford B. Collins
Giuliana A. Conti
James A. & Mary A. Craft
Nancy Cunningham*
Carol J. Damm
Stephen B. Damonte
Mr. & Mrs. Charles Davenport
Barbara Gross Davis
Mark F. De Witt & Susan L. Schleifer
John Del Greco, Jr.
Donald E. Denniston
Svetlana A. Didorenko
Joan Dix
James G. Doherty
Michael O. & Susan C. Donohoo
John W. Donovan
Stephanie L. Driscoll
Laurie P. & Scott M. Dubin
Christine L. Edmunds
Erik K. Eiber
Mr. & Dr. Richard A. Eigenheer
David Eiseman
Kathrine D. Eliason
Robert J. Fallon
Josephine & Leslie J. Fekete
Robert J. & Susan Ford
Margaret M. Frazier
Adam L. Frey
David C. Gan
Robert R. Gayle
Christopher M. Goslow
Harold C. Graboske, Jr.
Evelyn L. Gray
Estelle A. & Norman D. Greene
Rilla J. & Wiley J. Harsoe
Euretta & Herbert H. Hastings
R. H. & Theo Hausammann-Davidson
Frank E. & Lorraine F. Hauser
Katherine M. Heater
Stuart H. Hellman & Marsha T. Weintraub
Martha R. & Franklyn C. Hill, Jr.*
Bob & Susan K. Hoerger
Mr. & Mrs. Howard V. Holler
Karolyn M. Holler
David P. & Susan E. Houser
Tiffany J. Huang
David R. & Dolores Iventosch
Barbara A. & Herman L. Johnson
Christine R. Johnston
Marie G. Jureit-Beamish
Judith & Vincent S. Kafka
Miriam W. Kammen
Ronald M. & Yumiko J. Katsuyama
Michael S. Katz
Walter Kau
Sung Chan Kim & Jean Ahn
Leon Kirchner
Patricia S. Kline
Janet M. Kozawa
Marjorie K. & William J. Krend
Alan E. & Paula E. Kushnick
Ira M. Lapidus & Brenda A. Webster
William F. Larson
Robert S. Lee
Sau Ting J. Lee
Stanley Leibowitz & Paula L. Millman
Philippe T. Levy
Clinton Lewis*
Shawn Li
Alice Q. & Julian M. Libet
Lillian K. Lieberman
Leslie J. Lind
Nora Lindahl
Deborah B. Lloyd
Lucy J. Lo
Donald G. Loach
Joan K. & Stephen H. Ludwiczak
Jie Ma
S. Macahilig
Ruth E. Magnuson
Ellen S. Markus
Richard A. & Stephanie L. Martin
Charles J. & Laurene W. McClain
Margaret W. Mealy
Susan Medak
Paul J. Mercaitis & Suzanne M. O’Loughlin
David Milnes
Ronald Morra
Gregory S. Murphy
Shirlene L. Nakano
George R. Nave
Colum P. & Nora G. O’Donnell
Barbara M. & John P. Ohlmann
Igor & Irene Ohotsky
Robert L. Oswalt
Bruce N. Papp
Katherine R. Perl
George O. & Sandra K. Petty
John M. Phillips
Keith & Maria Polk
Andrew S. Pollock
Catharine G. & James Pricco
Joyce A. & Sidney D. Putnam
Bruce & Carlene C. Reeves
Barbara L. Reynolds
Derek H. & Roberta Richardson
For additional information on funding opportunities please write to me at [email protected]
or check the Department of Music website: http://music.berkeley.edu
Barbara L. Richmond
James R. & Yvonne M. Ricketts
Patricia J. Robinson & Roger E.
Schindewolf
Lawrence & Rochelle A. Rosler
Sofia Rosner & Ariel Sella
Martha Roth
Arlene Rothschild
Kay K. & Richard T. Schellhase
Martin Schiffenbauer
Allen R. Shearer
Divya P. Shenoy
George D. & Josephine A. Smith
Martha B. & Michael E. Smith*
Henry J. Spiller
Anne D. & Douglas G. Stewart
Linda Stiehl
James O. & Phyliss Stolaroff
Claude & Rosemary Stoller
Peggy J. & Robert P. Stratton
Gilda & William W. Strom
Andrew R. Sturges
Christina M. Sunardi
Andrew J. Szeri & Callen Sor
Marianne Z. Tanner
Elizabeth & John D. Taylor
Anne K. Tilt & David Arkin
Lois R. Tow
Helen M. & Joseph W. Tudisco
Francis R. Upton
Jan Vaage & Marilyn Vaage
James F. & Leslys Garrow Vedder
Miranda Vondornum
Kent & Ruth Warden
Daniel G. Watts
Charles M. Welch
Garrett N. Wellenstein
Kent W. Werth
Warren Winkelstein, Jr.
Helene Wood
Samuel P. Yap
Ting-Ta Yen
John P. Young
Arlene & Don Young
Mr. & Mrs. Bill Zbinden
Wendy K. Zukas
$ 4 9 & LEss
Numerous donations
BEQUESTS
Consider a bequest to the
department. Some of our alums
and emeritus professors have
included us in their plans.
Should you wish to do so,
please contact Roia Ferrazares
([email protected]).
*Deceased
** Both deceased
Heavy Lifters — continued from page 1
continues to reside in Berkeley. In her classes, which included
such illustrious alumni as David Del Tredici, Nathan Schwartz
and Janet Goodman Guggenheim. “She terrified because she
was so fast,” Gianopoulos continued, adding that this intensity
informed her playing. Citing one of her several performances (she
gave many, with the UC Orchestra, the Griller Quartet and other
chamber music combinations), “she was terrific, ferocious in a
way and so musical, with clarity to the thought. She was so good
in laying out a piece. There was a rigor to the architecture, you
became aware of how the piece was being built as she played it.”
All this informed her Piano Ensemble classes as it did her private
teaching.
That unswerving purpose fired her teaching, giving her
courses the reputation of most demanding but most necessary.
Her Musicianship course description summed it up, “The aim…
is to equip the student to hear the page of music” and goes on
to describe a complete and rigorous course involving “practice
constantly” of sight-singing music of increasing complexity,
harmonic and rhythm dictation and the learning of the clefs.
In 1966, Lawrence Moe, then Department Chair, heaped
the highest praise on her in a letter to the Dean of Letters &
Science requesting permanent employment status for Marjorie
Petray, although her rank of Lecturer was not in the tenure track.
“A great classroom teacher, she seems to have the knack of fresh
response to the problems of elementary instruction...largely due
to her great enthusiasm for and dedication to her subject and her
warmth and sympathy for young persons. She is a craftsman and
musician of the highest quality.” And on and on in that vein.
Gianopoulous recalled her using “The Magic Flute” in her
musicianship class (“She taught me to love Mozart, she thrilled
us”). Her piano teaching was also exceptional. Gianopoulos said
that after returning from studying in Europe, he gave a recital in
Hertz Hall and a week later, “Marjorie, who had heard it, called
me up and said, ‘Deno, I think you could be a much better
pianist than you are and, dammit, I want to teach you.’ She
never took a penny for those lessons.
They lasted at least an hour and a half. Some of the time,
we would sit on the sofa and read the scores and she’d ask ‘What
do you see here’? This was before we took them to the piano. I
needed a lot of technical piano work and she had the patience to
undo my hand and start me all over again.”
She might have made a fine career as a concert pianist. At
24, after studying piano at the Berlin Hochschule fuer Musik,
she decided that a career wasn’t compatible with marriage and
page 9
Alumni News
New York premiere of Fred Lerdahl’s The First
Voices. Ms. Lyons also was invited to perform
Puccini and Bellini arias with the Vermont
Philharmonic’s 50th Anniversary season in
October. In March, Clarissa received the
James Schwabacher Award from the Henry
and Maria Holt Competition through West
Bay Opera. She appeared as Mimi in La
Boheme with the Martina Arroyo Foundation’s
Prelude to Performance Program in July.
Ms. Lyons continues her studies at Dawn
Upshaw’s Vocal Arts Program at Bard College
Conservatory. She won her apprenticeship in
this program after an intensive series of auditions—only 8 singers from around the globe
are accepted per yea
Graduate Student News
In 2009–10, Rebekah Ahrendt held
research fellowships from the University of
Utrecht (the Netherlands) and the DAAD
(academic year in Berlin). She also received
the Eugene K. Wolf Travel Grant from the
AMS for further work in France and Belgium.
Two of her conference papers were honored
with awards: the Irene Alm Memorial Prize of
the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music
and the Paul A. Pisk Prize of the AMS. She
will finish her dissertation work in 2011 as
an Andrew W. Mellon/ACLS Early Career
Fellowships Dissertation Completion Fellow.
Her ensemble, Les grâces (including fellow
graduate student Jonathan Rhodes
Lee), completed its first professional recording in June 2010; the CD is scheduled for
release in late 2010.
David Coll has been selected as the
Composer in Residence with the Berkeley
Symphony during its current season, for the
“Under Construction:” series.
Sean Curran spent the academic year
2009–10 at King’s College, University of
Cambridge, funded by the Sydney Ehrman
Fellowship from UCB. He also won the
Grace Frank Dissertation Award from the
Medieval Academy of America, & the
Elizabeth C. Bartlet Award from the American
Musicological Society to pursue manuscript
research in Paris in 2010.
Sivan Eldar has been invited to join the
composition faculty of the John Adams Young
Composers for the 2010–11 academic year,
teaching weekly composition workshops for
students at the advanced level. She was also
part of the group show, Teen Age: You Jus
Don’t Understand, curated by UC Berkeley’s
Ken Goldberg and presented at the Catharine
Clark Gallery in San Francisco this fall.
Evelyn Ficarra premiered a solo piano
piece at the Chamber Bridge in May 2010
called The Arbitrariness of Language. She also
performed in San Francisco and Switzerland
and played in the November 2009 MANCA
Festival, where she was in a premiere of a
string trio with electronics known as VagueFenêtres. She was awarded the 2010 George
Ladd Prix de Paris.
Heather Frasch had a performance of
her piece Segmented Fragmentations by the
SurPlus Ensemble in Freiburg in Dec 2009.
SfSound commissioned and premiered a new
work to disassemble & reconstruct in SF, Jan
2010. Her piece Métal re-sculpté was performed at SEAMUS 2010 & NYCEMF 2010.
It will also be performed at the festival Third
Practice Electro-acoustic Festival this fall. Her
collaborative installation post-industrial organisms, was featured at the NYCEMF. This summer Heather was a participant in the Matrix
10 course at the SWR Experimental Studio in
Freiburg, where she took courses with Vinko
Globokar and Detlef Hussinger.
Composer Matthew Goodheart
S t a f f
U p d a t e
Staff Update
This summer when the new sound technician in the department Jay Cloidt‘s life calmed
down, he got busy with composing projects. The Joe Goode Performance Group project, Traveling
Light, which he scored for its opening in summer ’09, was revived at the Old San Francisco
Mint in July, and received warm reviews in the San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere.
Jay was commissioned to provide an original score for a celebration of the reopening of the
redesigned ODC Theater on 17th and Shotwell in San Francisco on September 30. ODC/Dance, San
Francisco’s premiere modern dance company, premiered Architecture of Light, a site-specific work in
which the audience experienced the sound score on wireless headphones as they moved through the new
building. The ODC company performed in changing combinations of dancers throughout the building,
with the full company and audience ending up in the newly remodeled theater space for the finale.
Jay has another ODC/Dance commission, the premiere of a new work by Kimi Okada, for their
yearly Dancing Downtown series in March 2011 at Yerba Buena Center. I was staring vaguely at the
Pacific is a dance work based on her experience as a Minneapolis-born person of Japanese origin traveling
as a foreigner in Japan. Kimi’s work is noted for its light touch and use of humor; and this piece will
incorporate out-of-context English texts, as used on advertisements, signs, and products in Japan.
Details of the upcoming ODC/Dance performances will be published at http://www.odcdance.org.
Some of Jay’s compositions and other musings are available at his website at http://www.jaycloidt.com.
University Carillonist Jeff Davis was an active participant at the annual congress of The Guild
of Carillonneurs in North America, held at the Longwood Gardens, outside of Philadelphia. Jeff
was a panelist for the forum “Adjudication 101,” performed on the Longwood Carillon, and was
a jurist on the 2009 GCNA carillonneur examinations committee. The GCNA also published
three new arrangements by Davis of works by John Dowland. American Carillon Music Editions
will be publishing four new carillon arrangements this fall, all works by Stephen C. Foster. In July, Davis gave recitals in the Chicago area on the University of Chicago, Naperville, and
Botanic Gardens carillons. Active throughout the year as a composer, Davis produced Eclogue for flute,
viola, and harp, Arabesque for solo cello, Birds In the Garden for high woodwind ensemble, Drumming
Up Business for percussion trio, and is currently working on a duet for carillon, as well as completing a
trio for Oboe, Oboe d’Amore, and English Horn.
Roia Ferrazares began as Music Department manager in April of 2010,
previously holding the position of manager for the Dean’s Office of the College of Letters
and Science. Before joining UC Berkeley in 2006, she spent five years working at Mills
College in Oakland where she coordinated the Public Policy Program and directed
recruitment for what is now the Lawrence I. Lokey Graduate School of Business.
Ferrazares has held numerous leadership positions on campus, was appointed chair
of Chancellor Birgeneau’s Staff Advisory Committee (CSAC) this year, and is serving
as the staff representative to the Operational Excellence Steering Committee.
Nanette Hara is a native of Denver, Colorado, and joined the Music Department
in August 2009 as the Academic Personnel Coordinator. She has been on the UC
Berkeley campus since March 1986 where she was employed by the School of Public
Health. In August 1994, she transferred to the International and Area Studies Teaching
Program and served as a Student Affairs Officer and Curriculum Coordinator. She was
nominated for the Chancellor’s Outstanding Staff Award in the Spring of 2009.
Lisa Robinson joined the Music Department as Student Services Advisor in August 2008. A
student to the core, Lisa holds two B.A. degrees in Music and International Affairs (with emphases
in Conducting, Arabic, and History respectively), and can easily sympathize with her simultaneous
degree and double major students. This past summer, she finished her first Ironman triathlon
(which consists of a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, and 26.2 mile run in under 17 hours), and then
maximized her training by doing it again 34 days later. Now that Ironman is over, her spare time
consists of playing bass trombone, taking flying trapeze classes, and planning her next big adventure.
The department’s new events manager, Jef Stott, a native of Los Angeles,
has been working in Performing Arts Administration for over a decade with such
prestigious organizations as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Berkeley Symphony,
New Century Chamber Orchestra, Philharmonia Baroque among others.
He has recently completed a Masters Degree in Interactive Media, with a thesis
project that uses the electromagnetic energy from the human brain and body to control
audio and visual media. He is also an adjunct faculty member of Cal State East Bay
University’s Music Department where he teaches digital audio production.
As a trained musical anthropologist, he has made an in-depth study of the instruments of the
Middle East with master teachers including Hamza el Din, and Omar Faruk Tekbilek among others.
As a producer and composer, he has released many full-length albums and
writes regularly for network and cable television, stage, video game and feature
film. Jef has embarked on several international tours that have taken him to Japan,
Turkey, Taiwan, Thailand, Canada, and many cities in North America.
He also is the owner the Embarka Recording Studios and Record Label in San
Francisco, where he is currently at work on several recording projects.
page 10
U p d a t e s :
C N M AT,
L i b r a r y,
Student News
C a r i l l o n
Programs, Library , Performance
Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT)
C
•
•
•
•
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NMAT continues to pursue its very active programs in research, education and public
events. Recent highlights include:
The CNMAT New Music and Inter-arts Projects Library (http://cnmat.
berkeley.edu/new_music). This new work was supported by a grant from the UC
Berkeley Humanities and Arts Research Technologies (HART) Demonstration
Project program. Our initiative—the CNMAT Collaborative Technology for
Multidisciplinary Research and Training—focused on web development strategies
for searchable, tagged web content such as audio, video, scores & text.
Open Sound West: Curated by Ken Ueno, David Wessel and Edmund Campion,
Open Sound West produced a series of major concerts at CNMAT by renowned
performers, improvisers, and composers such as Lou Bunk, matt ingalls, duo
pantoMorf (Per Anders Nilsson and Palle Dahlstedt), Michael Straus, Seth Josel, Earl
Howard, David Wegehaupt, Aaron Einbond, Matthias Kaul, and Samita Sinha.
Other CNMAT concerts featured artists such as Matana Roberts and Myra
Melford; Frank Gratkowski with Chris Brown, William Winant and David
Wessel; SIX (Jacques Demierre, François Houle, Charlotte Hug, Urs Leimgruber,
Thomas Lehn, Dorothea Schürch); Oni Buchanan; and Ryan Fogg.
CNMAT researchers published findings on new instrument building, new interfaces for
computer music performance, and time in music (http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/research).
They presented their work in conferences such as NIME (New Instruments for Musical
Expression), the International Symposium on Ambisonics and Spherical Acoustics, the Music
and Cognition Conference, and the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC).
Open Sound Control (OSC), a CNMAT-developed protocol for networked communication
among computers, sound synthesizers, and other multimedia devices, has been adopted by a
growing list of companies that includes Apple Computer, Meyer Sound Laboratories, Waves
Audio Ltd., Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU) and Native Instruments. —Richard Andrews
The Semi-Anechoic Chamber is a sound isolated space ideal for close microphone
sampling and any recording that requires near total sound isolation. The room was offered to the
department for free. The Center for New Music and Technology (CNMAT) funded the moving,
wiring and installation of the chamber into Morrison Hall.
Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library
I
n addition to the ongoing collection of new books, scores, and recordings, income from alumni
endowments enabled the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library to make significant additions
to its special collections. Purchases from antiquarian dealers included part books for Gesualdo
madrigals printed from 1607 to 1611, a complete set of manuscript parts for an anonymous
early 17th-century Italian madrigal, and late 18th- and early 19th-century editions of Danish,
English, and Italian ballet scores. At an auction in London last June, Professor Davitt Moroney
represented the Music Library by successfully bidding on a fine collection of early J.S. Bach
keyboard editions, the first edition of Haydn’s Piano Sonatas Op. 30, a manuscript of French
violin music from 1711, a manuscript of Franz Liszt’s 13th Psalm (1878), and a 1740 manuscript
of Handel’s complete opera Siroe. As donations, the Music Library received the manuscripts of
the late composer (and Cal alum) Peter S. Odegard and the papers of the late emeritus faculty
composer Andrew W. Imbrie. In December , Professor Emeritus Olly Wilson announced that
ongoing royalties from the compositions of Earl “Fatha” Hines will establish the Earl “Fatha”
Hines Music Library Fund to establish an Archive of African American Music in the Hargrove
Music Library.
—John Shepard, Head of the Hargrove Music Library
T
he Berkeley Carillon continues with its eighteen recitals weekly while
school is in session, as well as performances for selected special events on campus. With
the addition last year of associate carillonists Wesley Arai, Tiffany Ng, Margaret Pan, and Justin
Ryan, the playing staff of eight professional carillonists is the largest in North America. All the
professional staff have active concert careers throughout the world. In addition, the number of
students taking lessons on the Class of 1928 Carillon is currently twenty, with an average of
page 11
toured Germany this summer with concert
appearances and installations in Bonn,
Wupperal, and Berlin.
During the past two years, Jimmy
López has been awarded the following
prizes: 2009 Georges Ladd Priz de Paris
(UCB); Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at the
2008 Darmstadt International Course
for Contemporary Music (Germany);
2008 Morton Gould Young Composer
Award (New York); and 2008 Nicola
De Lorenzo Prize (UCB). His music
has been performed in venues including
Carnegie Hall, Aspen Music Festival &
Donaueschingen Contemporary Music
Festival and by the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra,
Atlanta Symphony, Baltimore Symphony,
Helsinki Philharmonic, Symphony
Orchestra of Chile and the National
Symphony Orchestra of Peru. His portrait CD titled Musuq Peru was released
under the label Filarmonika LLC in 2008.
Recent premieres include Lago de Lágrimas
(concerto for flute & orchestra) with the
Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra in 2009,
and 15 études for string octet by the Arditti
Quartet and Jack Quartet during the 2010
Darmstadt Contemporary Music Festival.
Future collaborations include performances
by conductor Lorraine Villancourt &
the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne; conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya & the Boston
Symphony & Philadelphia Orchestra; conductor Darrel Ang & the Singapore Youth
Orchestra of the World: and conductor
David Claudio & the Sibelius Academy
Orchestra.
In March, Adeline Mueller organized a multi-day conference on Mozart’s
The Magic Flute, and she is slated to
guest-edit an upcoming special issue of
Opera Quarterly on the subject. She was
the recipient of a UC Berkeley Chancellor’s
Fellowship in the 2009–10 academic year.
She has presented papers at the annual
meetings of the AMS (2008 and 2010)
and the American Society for EighteenthCentury Studies (2009 and upcoming in
2011). An article she wrote on the music
for Fritz Lang’s 1924 film Die Nibelungen
appears in the edited volume Wagner and
Cinema (Indiana Univ. Press, 2010)..
Awards, Prizes, Honors
The Concerto Audition: Every year the
University Symphony Orchestra holds
a Concerto Audition in which students
display their virtuosity. Congratulations
to everyone who participated. Spring
2009 soloists: soprano Melanie
Anderson, Music major, performed
Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of
1915; pianist Young Ho Na, international student studying music, performed
Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left
Hand; Kelsey Seymour, flute, fourthyear double major studying Music &
Chinese, performed Carl Nielsen’s Concerto
for Flute & Orchestra; Kevin Yu, fourthyear undergraduate studying Music &
Economics, performed Robert Schumann’s
Concerto for Cello & Orchestra. Fall 2009
concerto soloists: Michelle choo,
violin, fourth year double major in Music
& Integrative Biology, performed Jean
Sibelius’ Violin Concerto in D minor; Nils
Bultmann, violist, Music graduate
student in composition, performed Ernest
Bloch’s Suite Hébraïque. Sping 2010 soloists: Jessica Kuo, oboe, MCB major,
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Oboe Concerto
in A minor; Joe Neeman, violin,
P e r f o r m a n c e
E n s e m b l e s
Berkeley Carillon, continued from page 11
African Drumming & Dance on Cal Day
fifteen to twenty new applicants each semester. Current students also teach a DeCal class for
general university students interested in the instrument.
In June 2010, two of our students, Andrew Wetzel and Brian Tang, played their examination
recitals at the annual congress of The Guild of Carillonneurs in North America, held in
Naperville, Illinois. Both have the very rare distinction of having been passed unanimously by
both the jury and the voting members of the Guild. Congratulations to Andrew and Brian as they
enter the ranks of professional carillonists. —Jeff Davis, University Carillonist
Department performance ensembles
University Baroque Ensemble
Eco Ensemble director David Milnes
with graduate student composers and
CNMAT director David Wessell
Eco Ensemble
Gamelan Sari Raras with guest dancers
CK Ladzekpo has been teaching Ghanaian music in his ever-popular African Music
Ensemble since the early 1970s. The ensemble presents an evening concert each semester,
featuring guests artists. Before class students can be seen (and heard) in the courtyard outside
Hertz Hall practicing rhythms, dance moves, and songs as they warm up for the music and dance
workout that awaits them.
The University Baroque Ensemble, directed by Davitt Moroney, has been steadily
expanding from its initial five students; in five years, it has become a highly disciplined small
orchestra of 21 student musicians, playing without a conductor. The UBE gave its first full-length
evening concert on December 3, 2010 (music by Bach). We’ve also continued our program of
restoring old eighteenth-century violins to their original state and letting students play them.
Eleven antiques have now been brought back to life (at a cost of about $4,000 each). The UBE
would like to express heartfelt thanks to the many generous donors who have contributed to the
Baroque Music Endowment Fund. Expansion of this program is only possible at the moment
with strong continuing financial support.
Berkeley New Music Project | Eco Ensemble
The Eco Ensemble, led by conductor David Milnes (also University Symphony Orchestra
conductor), is a new ensemble-in-residence at UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio
Technologies (CNMAT) and the Department of Music. This premiere group is comprised of
prominent Bay Area musicians who are passionate about exploring and performing contemporary
works. Its mission is to enrich and serve the Bay Area’s cultural life through the creation,
performance, and dissemination of new music by composers from Berkeley and around the world.
Conductor David Milnes brings his extensive new music experience to the ensemble; Milnes
has assembled a dynamic group of musicians who are “...artists who are eager to engage. They
love new music, and it is this enthusiasm and passion that we bring into the ensemble.” The
Eco Ensemble annually presents a series of concerts that specialize in contemporary works by
established and emerging composers. Milnes remarks that the formation of this new ensemble
“will explore innovative techniques on instruments, rhythm, world music, and the latest research
in sound.” As UC Berkeley’s principal performance outlet for performers and composers of new
music, the Eco Ensemble commissions and premieres works from Berkeley’s composers. Members
of the ensemble work extensively with undergraduate and graduate musicians in new music
studies and are developing a comprehensive program for new music performance.
The Eco Ensemble’s unique collaboration with CNMAT inspires works that are informed
by contemporary explorations into the intersection between science and music. The ensemble
seeks to expand the possibilities for new music by working with CNMAT faculty, students
and researchers to develop new instruments, new applications of technologies for composition
and performance, and new modes of expression. With a focus on education for both
experienced audiences and novices, the Eco Ensemble’s public outreach efforts include lectures,
demonstrations, workshops, and composer residencies.
The Central Javanese Gamelan Kyai Udan Mas Thirty-five years ago Bonnie Wade,
then a new professor at Berkeley, arranged the loan and subsequent gift an exquisite set of
Javanese instruments from Sam and Louise Scripps. Gamelan classes and concerts have been a
regular part of the Department of Music offerings ever since. Currently taught by Midiyanto, a
renowned musician and shadow puppet master, the classes attract numerous students from across
campus, producing long waiting lists and fine dedicated classes. Noon concerts are performed
by beginning and intermediate classes at the end of each semester, while the advanced ensemble,
named Sari Raras (Essence of Harmony) offers full-length evening concerts. In April 2010, Sari
Raras accompanied Midiyanto in the performance of a shadow play at UC Davis and Hertz Hall,
as well as a brief preview at the Womens Faculty Club. Another shadow play is planned for April
2011. Recent fall concerts have featured dancer Wilis Ekowati, a graduate of Indonesia’s premier
arts academy who is currently pursuing a PhD at Berkeley.
page 12
P e r f o r m a n c e
E n s e m b l e s
Department Performance Ensembles, continued from page 12
Ten years ago Ben Brinner purchased a Balinese gamelan semar pagulingan with grant funds
from the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, which immediately loaned the instruments to the
Department of Music. Balinese gamelan classes now join Javanese as a class offering and on noon
concerts, with instruction provided by Balinese musicians who are visiting guest directors of
Gamelan Sekar Jaya, an Oakland-based community group that has always included UC Berkeley
students and alumni among its members.
The Gospel Chorus under Mark Wilson continues to draw throngs of students and presents
several concerts each semester and is now being offered in summer session as well as during the
academic year. A noon concert in Spring 2010 consisted of gospel selections from Hollywood
films and featured projections of stills from those films while the chorus sang. Guest musicians
provide instrumental support to the chorus at these concerts.
Students in the Jazz & Improvised Music Ensemble under Myra Melford have
participated in benefit concerts with jazz pianist/composer and two-time Grammy Award
nominee Taylor Eigsti & Trio in 2009 and Trio M in 2010. This April jazz pianist and composer
Denny Zeitlin performs solo with advanced student ensembles completing the program.
The last two years have seen varied programming for The University Chorus. In the
Fall of 2008, it performed a concert called “Gypsy Traditions” that featured music by Brahms,
Schumann, Liderman, and included collaborations with Edessa, a Balkan music ensemble,
and Danubius, a Hungarian music ensemble. The following spring featured a momentous
performance on April 22 of the Britten War Requiem in Zellerbach Hall. Marika Kuzma led
a chorus of 200 singers—the University Chorus and the UC Alumni Chorus (Mark Sumner,
director)—as well as the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir (Robert Geary, director) and large
orchestra. It was in fact the Berkeley premiere of this epic, anti-war masterpiece. The soloists
were Janice Chandler Etemé, soprano; Brian Staufenbiel, tenor: and Christopheren Nomura,
baritone. Praising the performance, the critic from San Francisco Classical Voice wrote: “UC’s
Marika Kuzma, who conducted, got it splendidly right. She and a supporting cast of hundreds…
thoroughly vitalized the 90-minute work.” The 2008–09 season saw more modest programming,
but equally varied: Mendelssohn Lobgesang, J.S. Bach Magnificat, Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms,
and Gershwin Porgy & Bess (concert version) with the UC Symphony.
The UC Chamber Chorus, directed by Marika Kuzma, just enjoyed a wonderful concert
at the Berkeley Art Museum as part of its L@TE series, performing on Nov. 5, 2010 the Allegri
Miserere and Morton Feldman Rothko Chapel to an overflowing audience. They repeated the
concert at the newly-opened Oakland Cathedral of Christ the Light the following evening. The
singers were pleased to collaborate in those concerts with the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio with
whom the chamber chorus first performed the work under Philip Brett in 1990. Their recording
of Rothko Chapel (with Abel, Winant, and Karen Rosenak) has become quite famous—played at
MOMA in New York, at the Smithsonian, and in the recent Scorsese movie Shutter Island. The
last two years have seen the Chamber Chorus in a concert of all-Berkeley composers and another
collaboration with the Mark Morris Dance Group in the spring of 2009; a concert of Slavic psalm
settings in the spring of 2010. It has been invited by Joana Carneiro and the Berkeley Symphony to
perform James MacMillan’s gripping Seven Last Words this coming spring (March 10) in Zellerbach Hall.
The University Symphony Orchestra
David Milnes has served as Music Director of the 120-member University Symphony since
1996, and has instituted cycles of symphonic music of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Debussy,
Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Mahler, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Sibelius among many others. Rehearsing,
performing and recording works of faculty and graduate student composers has long been a core
mission for the orchestra; the Symphony’s programs regularly feature world premieres of major
new works by gifted Berkeley composers. The University Symphony Orchestra performs several
evening and noon concerts each semester, supports a chamber orchestra and a wide-ranging
chamber music program under the direction of Leighton Fong, and continues during the
summer months as the UC Berkeley Summer Symphony. An annual concerto competition results
in regular concerto performances by the orchestra’s leading soloists, and regular coachings for each
section are given by a number of noted Bay Area professional musicians. This spring the orchestra
performs brand new music by visiting French composer Philippe Leroux, and later Mahler’s
Third Symphony with soloist Zheng Cao, the University Chorus and the Pacific Boychoir.
The University Wind Ensemble under the direction of Robert Calonico performs once
each term in Hertz Hall. In May 2011, the ensemble will perform a new work composed by Emeritus
Professor Michael Senturia, Impressions for Band. Calonico is also the director of the University
Marching Band that performs at football and basketball games, and other sporting and campus events.
page 13
Gospel Chorus
Jazz & Improvised Music Ensemble
University Chorus performs “Porgy & Bess”
excerpt on CalDay, Angela Arnold, soloist
University Chorus, “Gypsy Traditions”
University Symphony Orchestra
Wind Ensemble director Robert Calonico
and concerto soloiss
Student News
continued from page11
second-year graduate student in Statistics,
Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto;
Ernest Ting-Ta Yen, violin, graduate student in Mechanical Engineering &
Brady Anderson, cello, fourth-year
music major, together performed Camille
Saint-Saëns’ La Muse et le Poète
The Eisner Prizes A concert featuring the
winners of performance-related prizes is
given each year at noon on commencement day. The Eisner Prize in the Creative
Arts is a campus-wide competition and is
awarded for the Highest Achievement in
the Creative Arts in the fields of music,
drama, the visual arts, environmental
design, and English. In music the prizes
are awarded for outstanding achievement
in instrumental or vocal performance or in
musical composition.
Eisner 2009: Melanie Anderson,
soprano (BA, 2009), performed a selection of Mozart’s songs; Eisner Prize winner
Jonathan Rhodes Lee, harpsichord
(graduate student, H&L), performed
Franz Joseph Haydn’s Sonata in D; Eisner
Prize winner Kelsey Seymour, flute
(BA 2009), performed Henri Dutilleux’s
Sonatine for Flute & Piano.
Eisner 2010: Nils Bultmann, viola
(composition graduate student), performed
JS Bach’s Suite in G Major and Bultmann’s
Two Pieces for Solo Viola; Michelle
choo, violin, fourth year double major
in Music & Integrative Biology, performed
Johannes Brahms’ Violin Sonata No 1 in G
Major; Jennifer Ann Wang, composer
(composition graduate student); Kevin
Yu, cello (BA 2009), performed Sergei
Rachmaninoff ’s Cello Sonata in G Minor.
OTHER STUDENT HONORS
Outstanding Graduate Student
Instructors 2008–09: Duncan
Allard (Ethnomusicology), Evelyn
Ficarra (Composition), and
Jonathan Rhodes Lee (H&L).
2009–10 Outstanding Graduate
Student Instructors: Pattie Hsu
(Ethnomusicology); Adeline Otis
Mueller (H&L), Emily Richmond
Pollack (H&L).
The Nicholas C. Christofilos Jr.
Memorial Prize The 2009 recipient
was Adeline Mueller, graduate
student in H&L. The 2010 recipient was
Daniel Cullen, composition graduate
student. The prize is awarded annually to
a graduate student in music who combines qualities of outstanding intellectual
accomplishment with concern and support
for his/her fellow students. The Nicola
DeLorenzo Prize in Music Composition
was given to four graduate student composers in 2009: David Coll, Robin
Estrada, Matthew Goodheart,
and Amadeus Regucera. 2010
prizes were awarded to Gabrielle
Eunice Angeles, Evelyn Ficarra,
Heather Frasch, and Amadeus
Julia Regucera. Prizes are awarded
annually to qualified students who submit
the best-completed musical compositions.
The George Ladd Prix de Paris is given
annually to a student of music who has
attained the highest excellence in studies
in harmony and composition to enable the
recipient to study music composition for
one year in Paris, France. The 2009 prize
was awarded to Jimmy López. The 2010
prize was awarded to Evelyn Ficarra.
H e a v y
L i f t e r s
i n
t h e
D e p a r t m e n t
o f
M u s i c
Heavy Lifters — continued from page 9
having children. So
the Oakland native
went to Cal and
in 1937, at age 30,
earned her A.B. in
music. While still
an undergraduate,
she started teaching
musicianship in
the Department.
Her daughters,
Margie Petray Petzel and Anne Petray Stewart, both living in Berkeley, affirmed how deliberately
Marjorie separated her musical and family lives. Her teaching at home would start at 8:55 a.m.
after the girls had left for school, and stopped promptly at 3:55, when Brooke, her husband,
arrived home from his business. She had a sound-proof music room, because Brooke Petray,
although an amateur clarinetist, didn’t want to hear the practicing. Strange as it seems today, she
didn’t attend the Symphony, Opera and recitals in San Francisco because of that music/husband
dichotomy. For the same reasons, she remained content as a Lecturer and did not aspire to a
tenured rank.
Her daughters testify that as a mother, she was not directive and controlling as her teaching
role might suggest. She insisted that they choose their own course in life. “She extended herself in
parenting,” Anne and Margie agreed. Recalling Marjorie Petray is to pay tribute to one who was a
significant builder of the UC Berkeley Music Department and inspiration to its students.
Barbara Lull Rahm
B
arbara Lull Rahm, 1905–1978, was an almost exact contemporary of Marjorie Petray’s,
comparable in musical gift but different in almost every other way. Her soft, unassuming
manner gave no inkling of the extraordinary musical career she had, a career of which
possibly many of her private and UC Berkeley violin students knew little. Born in Belmont,
California, she spent her childhood in Portland, studying violin with her mother, giving
performances as a prodigy. At 11, she was brought to Berkeley, where she studied with Antonio
Grassi (teacher of Jaime Laredo).
At 25, she went to New York for three years of study with Leopold Auer (the legendary teacher
of Heifetz, Elman, and Zimbalist). In her scrapbook filled with glowing reviews of her recitals in
the major halls of England, Holland, France and Germany, was a handwritten letter from Auer,
dated 1923, recommending “Miss Barbara Lull, a young American violinist of superior talent,
completely equipped in musicianship and technique.”
Between the ages of 18 and 24, she played recitals in the major U.S. cities and appeared with
the Cleveland Orchestra, and the symphonies of St. Louis, Baltimore, Kansas City, Portland, El
Paso. For her New York recital in February 1928, her pianist was John Kirkpatrick, except for one
selection, when Aaron Copland accompanied her in his Nocturne (Ukelele Serenade).
In April 1928, she assisted Maurice Ravel in two lecture-recitals in Houston, playing with
him in his Violin-Piano Sonata, Berceuse, and Tzigane. The Houston Post-Dispatch critic wrote:
“A new star blazed in the musical firmament in Houston Friday night when Miss Barbara Lull,
daughter of H.M. Lull, executive vice-president of the southern Pacific Railroad, playing with
supreme mastery, won wild applause at the Ravel lecture concert.”
Suddenly, there is a gap in the reviews and programs. In 1929, at 24, she married Louis
Rahm and moved to Princeton, where he was a professor. He was opposed to her career, that sad,
all-too-familiar story, partially analogous to Marjorie Petray’s history. She bore and raised two
sons, taught and played chamber music before divorcing Rahm in 1947.
The 18-year interruption in her career limited its renewal. She
became concertmaster and assistant conductor of the UC Symphony,
principal second violin of the Oakland Symphony, and of course
continued as a dedicated teacher. On one program at Cal, she played
Roger Sessions’ Violin Concerto, the composer at the piano, probably its
premiere. But the concert career of a brief and brilliant six years was past,
carried forward, essentially as she passed on to her students in Berkeley
and at Cal all she had gained from it.
page 14
H e a v y
L i f t e r s
i n
t h e
D e p a r t m e n t
o f
M u s i c
John Meredith Swackhamer
J
ack, aka “Swack,” taught musicianship and harmony (as well as
analysis, score-reading and music history), for 50 years, a record
that no doubt, will never be matched. And inviting him to teach
in the Music Department, was—who else?—Marjorie Petray. He
was eventually to become her successor, of course, as head of the
musicianship program.
Swack followed Roger Sessions from New York to UC Berkeley
after studying with him and Ernst Krenek at the New School for
Social Research. He had earlier graduated from Black Mountain
College in North Carolina, and served as a medical corpsman with
the U.S. Army ski troops during World War II.
At Cal, he quickly became involved in theater, through the
Dramatic Arts Department, scoring Eisler’s music to Brecht’s The
Measures Taken, composing music for six major dramas at Cal, for the Berkeley Repertory
Theater’s Love’s Labour Lost, ACT’s production of Dos Passos’ USA, and productions of
Aristophanes’ The Women Take Power and Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid, as well as chamber
and orchestral works. There was no more consistent no more devoted advocate of new music
performance in the Bay Area than he, a central participant in The Composers’ Forum and a
founding member of Earplay. I never attended a new music performance in the Bay Area but that
Swack was also present, greeting his myriad friends with the characteristic Swackhamer smile and jest.
Beyond his music, he was a social activist, president of the East Bay Center for the
Performing Arts (Richmond), teaching in the Young Musicians Program at UC, organizing
benefit concerts for Musicians Against Nuclear Arms. He was a loving and ever-involved father
to seven children, and an engaged citizen when it came to educational, environmental and other
community issues.
The biggest of his many contributions was unquestionably his teaching and its indelible
effects. It was summed up in the memorial tribute by four colleagues: “Endearing to his
colleagues and students were his hearty laugh, the twinkle in his eye, his uncompromising
honesty, his appetite for heated discussion, and his total lack of animus. Fellow musicianship
teacher Elizabeth Davidson writes, ‘All of us who worked with John… remember his unfailing
support, his enthusiastic mentoring, and how he nurtured the tradition of working together
that had always been a part of teaching in the musicianship program. A composer, he had keen
perceptions on hearing new works, especially those by colleagues in the department and in the
music community outside. Interested in many different facets of musical life in the department,
he shared his time and ideas generously. All of these aspects were one in John Swackhamer.’”
There were other heavy lifters. Abe Sherman, Elizabeth “Dibby” Davidson, and Michael
Senturia come to mind. These three were also exceptional in their dedication to the art and
the students as unselfconscious, distinguished teachers. Readers of this may wish to share their
reminiscences of these very special masters who cultivated and inspired in generations of UC
music students the love of music, and, in the course of their learning, how to hear and make
it. You are invited to send these tributes to Kathleen Karn, [email protected] or to the
Department of Music, 104 Morrison Hall #1200, University of California, Berkeley, 94720.
—Robert Commanday, January, 2010
D
Student News
continued from page14
HEAVY LIFTERS — continued from page 14
New Courses in the Department
uring her first two years in our
department Assistant Professor Tamara
Roberts has already enriched our
curriculum with courses on Afro-futurism and on
music in the Civil Rights Era, while also teaching
the large Music in American Cultures (Music
26AC) which has become a staple of campus life
since its inception nearly 20 years ago. Other
faculty are also actively exploring new areas. For
spring 2011 James Davies and Nicholas Mathew,
who both have training as concert pianists, are
teaming up to offer a pair of undergraduate
seminars on the piano and pianism, while
Jocelyne Guilbault will be offering an
undergraduate seminar titled “Music, Politics,
and Pleasure: The Cultural Work of Party Music
in Trinidad.” Holley Replogle-Wong, our
ACLS Faculty Fellow, is bringing us several new
courses: “Music for the Shadows: Noir Film
Scores” as a seminar for freshmen and “Musical
Theater: American Identity and Cultural
Hierarchies,” a graduate seminar.
page 15
The Bernece B. Lyon Memorial Prize, given
to students who propose a worthy project
in music performance, was awarded in 2009
to graduating senior Jung Hyun Kwon
and third-year student Isaac PastorChermak. In 2010 the award went to
graduating senior Vanessa Nicole Yang.
The David and Diana Menn Memorial
Prize in the Performing Arts was awarded
in 2009 to graduating senior Jung Hyun
Kwon, voice, who performed a selection of
songs in the concert preceding the commencement ceremony; and in 2010 to graduating
senior Gabrielle Eunice Angeles.
Two prizes are awarded annually for outstanding creative talent in the performing arts—one
to students enrolled in the Department
of Music and one to students enrolled in
Dramatic Arts. The prize is given by the family as a memorial for the children, David and
Diana, who died in an accident.
The Matthew William Fisher Memorial
Award in Music was established by Ray and
Sally Fisher in honor of their son who died
tragically just before his scheduled graduation
in 2005. The award is given at graduation each
year to the graduating senior chosen to receive
the Departmental Citation. The recipient in
2009 was graduating senior Elizabeth
Roth. In 2010 the recipient was graduating
senior Michael George Kushell.
The Mary Nuñes Souza Prize is given for a
special project designed to supplement the student’s training. In 2009 the prize was awarded
to undergraduates Kelly Jenkins & Ian
Roy. In 2010 the prize was awarded to undergraduate Brian Chow.
The Milton G. Witzel Memorial Prize
in Stringed Instrument Performance was
given in 2009 to graduating senior JuinKai Chou, cello, who performed Dmitiri
Shostakovich’s Sonata in D Minor in a concert honoring performance prize winners
just before the commencement ceremony.
In 2010, it was given to graduating senior
Jacob Hyun Chi, baroque violin, who
performed Georg Telemann’s Fantasia No 1
in B-flat Major in a concert prior to the commencement ceremony. The Witzel Prize is
awarded annually to a Music undergraduate
or graduate student for continuing creative
achievement in performance on a stringed
instrument or to a student composer for work
to be performed on a stringed instrument.
Music faculty at commencement 2010
Professor Taruskin hoods graduate
student speakerWilliam Quillen
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Music
1 0 4 Mo r r i s o n H a l l # 1 2 0 0
B e r k e l e y, C A 9 4 7 2 0 - 1 2 0 0
N o n P r o f i t O r g a n i z at i o n
U . S . P o s t a g e P a i d
University of California, Berkeley
Address Service Requested
December 2010
The Music Department’s
A lumni N ewslet ter
is published by the
Department of Music,
College of Letters & Science,
UC Berkeley
Department office
510.642.2678
Kathleen Karn, photographer
Visit our WebSites
D epartment of M usic
http://music.berkeley.edu
M usic L ibrary
http://library.berkeley.edu/music
C enter for N ew M usic and
A udio T echnologies (CNMAT)
http://cnmat.berkeley.edu
B erkeley C arillon
http://music.berkeley.edu/carillon
© Copyright 2010 The Regents of the University of California
In an effort to cut costs and conserve resources,
we are publishing our newsletter online. To be notified when the next alumni
newsletter is available, please send an email message to [email protected] and
in the subject line enter: subscribe alumni newsletter
Are you a Department of Music alumna or alumnus? Would you like to attend a gathering
of alumni in Hertz Hall on a Sunday afternoon? We would like to hear from you. Please contact chair
Ben Brinner ([email protected]) or department manager Roia Ferrazares ([email protected]).
They can also be reached by phone at 510 642-2678.
Photograph: Sezi Seskir performs a noon concert on the Erard piano in Hertz Hall.

Alumni News 09-10 - Department of Music

Transcription

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